can't be hung for that. Because humor is the
evidence of freedom, isn't it?"
Yes, or of having gone completely daft. But barrister Bono
brings the soul brigade to his defense. " You see this in black
music. t can be fun, funk. They can glamour-puss ; up awl they're
telling stories of the street. ; seems white music's got this very
Strict rule book, and I'm not buying into it."
Or cashing out. "From the word go, we wanted to be at the top of
the pop charts; we wanted to take it on. But we also wanted the
freedom to put out something like the Passengers or Zooropa," Bono
says, invoking their last two, more ambient albums, "where we Can go
off. It's a blueprint that goes back to the Beatles. We're basically
living out the White Album !" As if mentally cataloging four LP
sides, he quickly qualifies that ambition. "Well, there's a few
tracks we should dodge. But do you know what I mean ? "
NEVER MIND THE White Album as reference points go, how about The Who
Sell Out? U2 have been actively satirizing the demons of Corporate
culture and media. overload—and, to a lesser extent, spoofing their
own complicity—since l991's Achtung Baby and the Zoo TV tour
commenced in 1992.
PopMart
certainly isn't without a dollop of the same postmodern
reflexiveness: The press conference to announce the tour took place
in a New York City Kmart. And presiding over the stage is a
100-foot-high yellow arch intended to evoke not the spirit of St.
Louis but a Quarter Pounder With Kitsch.
Still, it's not easy to tell where the wink ends and selling
begins. At issue lately is U2's promo tie-in with ABC-TV, which
manager Paul McGuiness calls a "mutually beneficial branding
arrangement The group authorized an eye-catching "ABC is Pop"
campaign juxtaposing shots of Tim Allen, Michael J. Fox, and Stephen
King's T/le Shining g against what looked for all the world like a
"Discotheque" video. Less clever was A Year in Pop, the prime-time
special the group got in r etude—and which delivered a dismal 2.7
rating the night after PopMart's debut—featuring an embarrassing
Dennis Hopper narration that had even charitable fans
crying"infomercial."
Rob Lowe got a big laugh recently with a Saturday Night Live
monologue when, pretending to read from an 80's (liar y he'd found,
he enthused dreamily that the super-idealistic U2 would "never
sellout."
The
Edge isn't worried. " While I don't mind somebody else having a
laugh about it, I can quite honestly say that nothing has changed in
our perception of that side of things since the first record," the
guitarist says. "I don't think we ever had confusion about the
importance of commerce in the equation.... And we were commenting,
in Zoo TV and Achtung Baby, on a lot of commercial things and
playing around with rock-star images. But we were aware of what we
were doing. We hadn't been overtaken by the lifestyle."
